OPINION: I Have No Love For Al...

I have no love for al… -Qaida. I knew two people killed on 9/11, and my brother was in Tower 7 when he saw the planes fly into the towers. By connection to friends and family, I know many more people who lost loved ones and whose children and families continue to suffer 10 years later.

I certainly understand wanting revenge and retribution. I brought a teen to the United States for eye surgery. A South Sudanese boy, he was taken as war booty into the Arab North. His slave master hanged him upside down and blinded him. After a cornea transplant, he is slowly regaining his slight in one eye. His other eye, as they say in South Sudan, is “finished.” His mother is still held in the North in slavery. Personally, I do not want his torturer to occupy space on the planet, but the rule of law is something for which I have extreme respect. The law must be followed, and he deserves a trial like anyone else – even though my anger toward this boy’s torturer is extreme.

I have also traveled around the world and have had cab drivers tell me, in English-speaking countries as well as in countries where Arabic is the dominate language, that “the Jews and George Bush” designed 9/11 for their own purposes. You can argue till you are blue in the face, and you can’t change their mindset.

But as I was walking from my tent to a donor’s basketball court in South Sudan on Friday, I called my office. “News?” I asked. “Yes,” replied one of our reporters, “They got Awlaki with a drone.” The man next to me, a conservative, rejoiced. I was in shock.

My conservative traveling partner and I began to spar immediately.

“He is evil, and now he is dead,” he said.

I replied, “Last time I looked, he was an American citizen. I thought we had a rule of law, a Constitution.”

“Yes,” said my friend, “but he inspired others to kill.

Wow, I thought, al-Qaida has gotten us to do something that we never dreamed of when I was taught in our wonderful public-education system. It has pushed us to the edge of breaking the law, the Constitution. American citizens, I thought, were innocent until proven guilty. Americans had a right to be tried in a court of law.

I do not believe for a nanosecond that we needed to send a CIA drone over to Yemen to kill this man. We have provided rendition flights to places we do not normally do business with, such as Syria, so our suspects could be tortured and our hands would be clean. We went in the dead of night and took Osama bin Laden out and managed to not kill the women and children in the compound. Now, the CIA and our government would like its citizens to believe that they could not have captured Anwar al-Awlaki and brought him to justice in the United States? I find that impossible to believe.

In politics, such actions are called a slippery slope. If we can send drones over to a country that we are not officially at war with and take out an American citizen that did not even have a proper indictment, then what can be done to any American citizen?

My brother and I must have been along the same lines of thinking, because when I got to a place where I could access the Internet, I saw that he had written an article for the Guardian. The Center for Constitutional Rights, of which he is president, has filed a lawsuit to prevent these drone killings. Some may say my brother is too radical, but the Financial Times quotes a more “mainstream” law professor from the University of Notre Dame, May Ellen O’Connell. She said, “Under International Law the killing of Awlaki though military force is clearly unlawful. … The United States in not a war in Yemen. This was the killing of a criminal suspect with no attempt to arrest.”

The America I love, the America of which I am a citizen, is a better country than the one that sends drones to kill citizens without trial. The America I love is governed by the rule of law. The America I love did not follow its own ideals and beliefs in the killing of Anwar al-Awlaki. This drone killing is not our finest moment. If we let the bad guys take us away from our cherished and time-honored laws, we have given up a piece of our country to them – even if they are dead.

OPINION: DADT Finally Over, What Took So Long?

This week, “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” the policy crafted by the Clinton administration to stop the witch hunts in the military, ended. It failed miserably as a policy. Thirteen-thousand service members were discharged while the policy was in effect, and many were in mission-critical positions.

Too many people who do not like homosexuals – or who think that they are sinful creatures needing to repent or be repaired – did not see these discharges as a problem. They want a military free from homosexuals and sexuality in general. Many are the same people who are not registering their utter horror and disgust toward the women who are preyed upon by men in the military and are often afraid to report on the abuse they suffer for fear of retribution. Although many in the military have tried their best to end any harassment of women, numerous people in positions of authority have looked the other way. Why hasn’t there been more outrage against males’ harassing behavior? Why hasn’t overall conduct been the defining factors in the military, instead of someone’s sexuality?

“Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” did not mean that you could have a private life as a gay American. It meant that if anyone found out about your life, even if you kept it quite, that you could be discharged. People were “reported” and harassed for listening to what others considered “gay music.” A soldier could not go to a gay bar or dance on their own time when not in uniform, as they could be reported.

Thirteen-thousand people were discharged by many more left because they did not want to be found out. Often these young soldiers enlisted to cope with their own demons regarding their sexuality, only to find out that they were who they were and no psychologist or minister could make them straight. Many of these people left the military so they could live their lives and not live in fear of being found out and kicked out.
I know several people who left. They are people who could have offered so much and served their country. One became a doctor. Two became lawyers. One heads a software department. No one wanted to leave, but facing hiding who they were on a daily basis was against everything they were taught about honesty in the military forces.

It has been less than one week since the ban was lifted. One officer got married in Vermont at the stroke of midnight. The organizer of OutServe, previous closeted organization of 4,000 active duty gay members of the military, gave the world his name and announced that its magazine was going to be sold on base. No one has freaked out serving with gay people. Like the experience in Canada’s military, most gay soldiers did not take the opportunity to “come out.” Most are just happy that they will be not be discharged.

However, the overall question is, why did it take so long to enact a policy and why are some people so determined that this policy is going to fail? What are people afraid of?

This issue will not be a factor in the 2011 presidential race, except where it will show some of the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” promoters to be dinosaurs whose time has past. A new generation of voters, people who were young toddlers when “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” went into effect, think the naysayers have old ideas. They do not want to vote for a candidate who is out of touch. This week’s Florida debate, where the gay solider who served in Iraq was booed, shows how out-of-touch some of these older voters are.

As we said in the 1960s: “The times, they are a changing.” I am glad they are, and so are the gay soldiers who serve our country.

TRNS Interview: EU Commissioner Kristalina Georgieva

Talk Radio News speaks with Kristalina Ivanova Georgieva, the European Union’s Commissioner for International Cooperation, Humanitarian Aid and Crisis Response, about pressing global issues.

Commissioner Georgieva details what is being done in drought-hit Somalia, South Sudan and the Horn of Africa. (8:43)

Listen 

A Decade Later, America Still Reeling From 9/11

I turned 50 two weeks to the day before 9/11. On September 8th I had a huge blowout party, with my friend Kate Taylor singing “Forever Young” among other tunes. On Monday, September 10th, Kate called to tell me her husband Charlie was being Med-evacuated from Martha’s Vineyard to Massachusetts General Hospital. I got on one of the last shuttles out of D.C. and spent the night in the hospital.

The next morning, 9/11, I got a call from our staff. We were assigned “pool” duty that day at the White House. Pool means it is our turn to be with the President when he is out of the White House while in the Washington D.C. area. Turn on the television, they said, “someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center.” Our staffer at the White House left as everyone else did and ran all the way to the Democratic National Committee. Cell phones were not working. He went there and used their phones to call in reports and communicate with the rest of us.

I called my brother who answered and was quickly walking down the steps of Tower number #7. He told his daughters he was already out of the building. He saw the first plane go into the towers. Despite orders to stay in the building he and others got out. My other brother was running near the center and saw the plane fly in.

I knew two people who died on 9/11. “Nice Guy Dan,” who was working in the Towers and had just graduated from Georgetown with an MBA, and Barbara Olsen, who was a kind and gentle soul even if she was my polar opposite on the Fox News Channel.

Charlie’s doctor came in shortly after we were able to comprehend what had just happened. He stood by his bed and said “Charlie will leave us not knowing how horrible the world can be.” Charlie died early on 9/12. A week later my family and I had dinner. It was September 17th, the 40th anniversary of my father’s death. We were all too stunned to talk about what had happened the week before. My brother said that the terrorists succeeded in destruction beyond their wildest imaginations.

Ten years and two wars later, their destruction is still evident. Like many family and friends of victims who died on 9/11, “Nice Guy Dan’s” best friend never quite recovered….

America goes on but with a lot less gallop in its step. Much of what we do and think as a country is seen through the lens of 9/11. It defined the last ten years. We need a new perspective and new ideals and plans to define the next ten years otherwise we risk letting those terrorists imprint our national psyche. Our psyche and our strength as a country must be greater than the will of our enemies.

OPINION: Obama's Labor Day Gift To America

Today is Labor Day. Most of us think of it as the last day before we go back to work after summer vacation. But, for many people, there is no back-to-work day, as there is no work. The stunning news this week was that Labor Department statistics show no job increase last month. That does not mean there were no jobs created. It means, with the loss of jobs and the gain of jobs, there was no net job growth.

What can we possibly do about this? I have written about tax cuts and how they are not effective in job creation before. Many of you disagree, but there have been tax cuts in effect since the Bush era and the unemployment rate still hovers around 9 percent. There are also those who think cutting our spending will increase confidence, reduce the debt and deficit and therefore inspire the spending by corporations so they will create jobs. Will that really create jobs? That is anyone’s guess.

I am excited to hear what the president will say on Thursday night. He obviously considers this such an important speech that he asked to address a joint session of Congress. He is going to have to come up with a bold plan to make Congress and the American people pay attention. I am sure he will, even if he gets a lot of negative feedback from the Republicans.

The tea party talks about cutting taxes. Members of the Republican Party talk about cutting spending, but so far only Gov. Mitt Romney on the GOP side is suggesting that things be done in a business-like fashion.
I am not suggesting that Romney is a great candidate, only that he is suggesting less rhetoric and more of a planning process.

President Obama, I am sure, is aware of what happened under Franklin Roosevelt. After the New Deal investment and stimulus programs were cut, the Federal Reserve cut monetary availability. Both of those actions caused a severe rise in unemployment. It was only the draft and World War II that increased production, got factories moving again and employed many young Americans.

The recent stimulus program has been the butt of jokes and rancor. Many of the “shovel-ready” programs were anything but “shovel ready.” It was not as targeted as it should have been, but it got many people working again. It put America more into debt, but it did not cause the huge additions to the deficit that we are now seeing. (Other spending, including tax giveaways, Afghanistan and Iraq, have added to the runaway debt.) People started spending money again, and consumer confidence rose.

This week the Center for Budget and Priorities analyzed the recent Congressional Budget Office report on the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, or ARRA, and found that the number of people employed because of it was between 1.0 and 2.9 million. These are jobs that would have never been created if it were not for the stimulus program.

According to the center’s analysis, the “CBO also includes new projections of the Recovery Act’s jobs impact through 2012. It finds that in the current quarter (the third quarter of 2011), there are 0.8 million to 2.5 million more people employed because of ARRA.” The CBO’s report indicated that the ARRA succeeded in its primary goal of protecting the economy during the worst of the recession.

Leaks about the president’s job speech say that he will support continuing the payroll tax cuts and extend unemployment benefits. Both of these plans make sense. Cutting taxes to those who can least afford to pay them makes more sense than cutting taxes on the richest Americans who can afford a bit of an increase in taxes. President Obama is also expected to promote investment in infrastructure jobs. Like the New Deal programs under FDR and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act passed in 1973, which continued under President Reagan, the United States needs government intervention to get America working again.

My hope for Thursday night is that the president is willing to take on his political foes and present a bold plan, a plan that will get Americans back to work and the country’s economy back on track. It would be a fitting Labor Day gift to America.